Old Joe Grady and Music
Old Joe Grady doesn't know anybody who loves what they do more than people making music. They tap their fingers, slap their thighs, pat their feet. Their bodies seem to vibrate to the very heartbeat of creativity. Like everybody, from time to time Old Joe contemplates the afterlife--whether there is one and, if so, what it's like. If there's a heaven, Old Joe thinks music has got to play a big part in it. Not the sound of music so much as the making of it. Good musicians, Old Joe has observed, will drop anything to do it. They will forget to eat, they will leave work early, they will arise from deathly illness, they will stay up until it's too late to go home. Their life is the music.
But, alas, it's a kind of living greatly thwarted in Old Joe Grady. Old Joe is so tone deaf his fingers turn to wood whenever they come close to frets or valves or keys. His singing is no better. Finding the right note, for Joe, is like slipping over a cliff and grabbing for an exposed root. Your chances are not good, and if you do find one, you aren't about to let it go to try for another. When he was a kid, Old Joe was the only person ever to audition for the children's choir at his church and get turned away. Destroyed one of the many dreams of his youth, Old Joe conducting an orchestra in a great concert hall. Now he would give anything to be able to sit on the porch with a bunch of fellers and pick a banjo. Or just beat on a trashcan and keep up with the rhythm.
When he was a teenager, Old Joe Grady's dad took him to hear Hudie Ledbetter sing. Leadbelly, as they called him, spent a good deal of time in jail, but that didn't stop him from singing. In fact, it gave him a lot of his formative training, because what he sang was the Blues. Old Joe still remembers one song he sang that day. It was about a black man picking cotton. The day was long and the sun was hot. All he had to look forward to was an occasional water break when his girlfriend would bring out a bucket of cool water. Throughout the song Leadbelly would sing over and over, "Bring a little water, Sylvie. every little once in awhile." By the time Leadbelly had finished the song, Old Joe thought all anybody could ever want out of life was a cool drink of water. He imagined sipping the water out of a metal dipper, thinking about a lovely girl and the end of a hard day. Fifty years later Old Joe still likes drinking water out of a metal cup, all because of Sylvie.
Of course, not all music is inspiring or even pleasant to listen to. In fact, some of it is downright disagreeable. Because Hell is music too, Old Joe thinks. Bad music; bad performers. Actually not music or performers at all. Screeching, blaring, electronic racket some charlatan has packaged and sold as music. In the afterlife, according to Old Joe Grady, participants in such abomination should be welded to a jackhammer. To those who claim he is out of tune with the times, that he ought to be more accepting of diversity, Old Joe replies that this is one instance when being out of tune works to his advantage. Because anything which destroys first the eardrum, then the brain cannot be considered music. After all, no one would say that, just because you can swallow arsenic or carpet tacks, you have to call them food.